Wild Tales (43 page)

My partners: priceless.

The night before we left on tour, I had more incentive not to go. Susan gave birth to our third child. Another boy, according to the doctors and the scans. But in our home in Los Feliz, where all of our
children were born, all the experts came up short. “Hey, I know a vagina when I see one,” I said. A
girl
! We had a baby girl. Susan and I were overjoyed. Nile Ann Mary Sennett Nash. A long time comin’, to be sure, but now our family was complete.

CSN started our tour the day after Nile was born, July 29, 1982. God bless Susan for her strength. I took off for the road, leaving her with three young children (including the newborn). Our first show was three days later, in Hartford, Connecticut. We had no expectations about the makeup of our audience, whether they’d be aging hippies, a college crowd newly tuned in to our music, or ghouls waiting to see Crosby collapse onstage. The complexion of the rock crowd was rapidly changing. We, the sixties stoners/radicals, had begun edging into our forties. We’d become classic rockers.
Classic!
Mainstream.
Mainstream!
Relegated to AOR—Adult Oriented Radio—stations.
Adult!
To quote Aristotle: Ain’t that a piss! Even Neil, who was on tour in Europe, was shooting off his mouth, comparing us to Perry Como. The next generation, the emissaries of the Video Age, were already claiming their piece of the rock. Rightfully, they followed their own apostles: Talking Heads, Prince, Mötley Crüe, Springsteen, the Clash, Run-DMC, the Police, Michael Jackson. Would they come see us? Impossible to say. But as we rolled out, word drifted in from the network of promoters that we were drawing from across the age spectrum. Still, we had to connect with the kids.

I wasn’t worried for a New York minute.

W
E TRAVELED ON
three individual buses that had been converted into spacious living quarters. In a way, they enabled us to stretch out in privacy, and in another way they enabled David to get high. He could smoke his way from one gig to the next with no interference from Stills or me. He was now traveling with his drug dealer, a pretty shady character named Mort,
*
who’d taken
over most of David’s business affairs. They worked out a deal whereby Mort would supply Croz with enough credit for the drugs in exchange for a large chunk of income and royalties. Mort had a piece of everything David did: albums, publishing, tours, concessions, the works. It was sickening to watch it all go up in smoke. Croz kept promising that he would clean up his act, but that part of his act got darker and dirtier. There were plenty of crack addicts who made that sad scene, hangers-on who’d score off him and split. Croz sold one of them the publishing to “The Lee Shore” for dope.

Come showtime, things didn’t improve. It actually got so bad, we had to build a room adjacent to the stage so Croz could wander off and freebase between songs. Often, David walked offstage, threw up from the drugs, and was literally dragged back to sing. In Philadelphia, on August 11, he had to leave the stage because he wasn’t functioning. On the fly, Stephen and I did a couple of songs together, then Stephen did a solo set—we were creating a show spontaneously, as was needed. When it was my turn to solo, Stephen left the stage while I sang. He found Crosby nearly comatose on a couch in the dressing room, threw a bucket of ice water on him, and when David came back he was completely soaked.

Because of David’s arrests, we now became targets. I remember going to a small airport somewhere in the Phoenix area. In those days, you could get counter-to-counter service. Let’s say you wanted a lawyer’s letter that needed to be signed. You could arrange for someone to go to the United Airlines desk in one city and drop off the letter to be picked up on the other end of the flight. David had arranged to receive some dope that way. We got to the airport and picked up our bags. He went to the airline counter and said, “Is there a package for David Crosby?” The attendant said, “Just a minute, let me go and see.” Immediately David’s antennae went up, and so did ours. It wasn’t “Mr. Crosby? No problem, here it is.” “Let me go and see” was weird. Something was wrong. When the guy brought the package out, it had already been opened. David was smart about it.
He said, “No, that’s not for me. I’m expecting a letter.” And we left—but we all got the message fast.

It was getting hairier and hairier, no doubt about it. And too bad, because the concerts were all sellouts and really well received. It was just as I’d thought; we had no problem connecting with the kids. Our audience actually expanded. Even the press was largely enthusiastic. We weren’t
classic
or
mainstream
or
adult
—just
relevant.

But we continued fighting our own demons. On September 6, at the final gig of the summer portion of the
Daylight Again
tour at Irvine Meadows in California, we hit the end of our last song,
“Teach Your Children,” put our guitars down, and took bows, which is when the police came for Crosby. They’d been looking for any excuse to bust him again, using an old arrest warrant from 1980. It was a bogus charge and eventually dismissed, but it wasn’t going to help that ongoing charge in Dallas. In fact, that case resulted in a formal indictment, which meant Crosby was going to trial.

It made us reconsider continuing the second part of the tour in November. As always, David had promised to clean up and get help, but the reality of it was far from that. Some of my friends thought I was crazy for putting up with this shit. We were always in jeopardy of busts—or worse. In a way, we’d always been walking a tightrope, walking over a chasm with a lake at the bottom, and in the lake were sharks. But it’s one of the things that makes us an interesting band to observe. Everybody knew what Crosby was going through. Once again, I chose to see the light, because I knew in my heart that David was worth saving.

Besides, we had to tour because, suddenly, we had another big hit that needed promoting. “Southern Cross” was originally a song called “Seven League Boots” by the Curtis Brothers. Stephen heard it and said, “It’s got the essence of something good. Let me try to do something with it.” He transformed it, as he’d altered Joni’s “Woodstock”—changed it musically, put the chorus in there,
souping it up, new title. And it became a smash. We were back on the road, back on the tightrope … over the shark pool.

This time out, the cities may have changed, but the offstage scene was painfully familiar. The shows were great, capacity crowds, one encore after another. Great energy, great vibe. A lot of magic—and a lot of pain. For the most part, Crosby was well behaved. The rampant drugs somehow didn’t disrupt our performances. But by the time we got to the end of the tour, the onstage facade was beginning to crumble.

On Thanksgiving weekend, CSN played three shows at the Universal Amphitheatre in LA, which we filmed for a two-hour TV special. For some unknown reason, David freaked out. He hit the pipe extra hard before we went on, and the effects of it were all on film. His eyes were completely dead; he wasn’t reacting to the music. And his singing wandered off-key. Now, I’m pretty good at the console in the studio. I can fix anything—move vocals from one side to the other, fine-tune voices, and there was a lot of that going on. But with film, combining all three nights into one show, the thing I couldn’t fix was how David looked. He looked like death warmed over—barely—so I couldn’t show him full-face. It was an engineering and editing nightmare.

By the new year, 1983, I needed a break, something tension-free to take my mind off the CSN upheaval. The Hollies seemed like just the right antidote, so I headed to England to work on their album. Once again, it was a little awkward between Allan and me, and I understood it. I knew how he felt. After fifteen years, I come back into a band that had been his baby since I split. He’d put his whole adult life into it, keeping them in the spotlight. It was a pretty delicate situation at first, but once we got into the studio it was like old times. It was the Hollies, my old mates, and everything just clicked. No one had to explain anything. Singing with Allan and Tony was flat-out fun. We just opened out mouths and all of us were
right there.

We cut a number of songs just like the old days: fast, no fuss,
bang-bang-bang.
Then I was trapped. I’d done the record, as promised—and now what? “Hey, we’re going to have to tour in America.” So I agreed to go with them. Part of me felt that it would be a lark, great to hang with Bobby, Tony, and Allan. After what I’d just gone through, it would put the fun back in touring, not having to look over my shoulder for police all the time. And part of me felt absolved of guilt—the guilt of having left the Hollies. Honestly, I wanted to resolve my relationship with
Allan Clarke. I still loved that guy and wanted to make things right.

While I was in England, I decided to visit my mother, whose health had been in a steady decline. She was living above the pub in Pendleton with another husband, Alf, a decent man who made her laugh. Only sixty-five, she looked frail, more delicate than I’d expected.

In my family, growing up, we’d never talked about feelings. Everything was on the surface; we never dug down or explored personal issues. A lot of that had to do with the postwar recovery process. You know, that shining English attitude: “Let’s just take a deep breath, luv, it’ll be better tomorrow.” That was the attitude we needed to survive. It was the way I was brought up, and to a certain extent I subscribe to it to this day. One of my survival tools is that it will always be better tomorrow, and working with Stephen and Croz, it’s come in pretty handy. But I’d been carrying around a vexing question for twenty-five years that my mother could only answer with some serious reflection.

I wanted to know why all my friends had been forced to get a real job when they turned sixteen, and I’d never gotten that pressure, especially from my mom, who ran the family. “Why was it you encouraged me?” I asked her all these years later. It must have caught her off guard, because she hesitated, glancing away, not sure how to respond.

Finally, she looked at me, sitting at the end of the bar in the pub,
and a thin smile creased her lips. “Because, Graham,” she said, “you are living the life I wanted for myself.”

Man, you could have knocked me over with a feather. She’d never said anything like this before. This was the first I’d ever heard about her ambitions beyond being a housewife and raising a family. I hadn’t realized she had her dreams, too.

“What do you mean, ‘I’m living your life’?”

She said, “Believe it or not, I thought I had a pretty nice voice and wanted to be on the stage, to be a singer like you. I thought I had something to offer with my talent. But World War II came along, I married your dad, I had three kids—and the dream was over for me. So you are doing what I wanted to do.”

This turned me inside out. While I was enjoying my life, getting the girls, living out the fantasy of a young rock ’n’ roller, my mom was watching and taking it all in. Inadvertently, I had pulled off my mother’s dream.

“Your dad and I were always so proud of you,” she said.

Wow! To hear my mother say that was incredible. Of all those teach-your-children moments that I’d been singing about, it took this conversation to put it in perspective. It answered so many questions I’d been grappling with for so long. It dawned on me that my parents were some of the characters I’d written about in
“Cold Rain,” stuck in their jobs, forced to accept certain circumstances. They sacrificed their dreams for mine. I’m eternally grateful.

A few years later, after my mom passed away, I found myself describing this conversation one night while Crosby and I were playing Carnegie Hall. For some reason, David needed to leave the stage. (No, not
that
reason—he probably just took a bathroom break.) So I began talking to the audience, explaining about my mother’s ambitions.

“My mother wanted to be on the stage,” I said, “and I thought about how great it would have been if she had made it to Carnegie Hall.” As I spoke, I reached into my right-hand jacket pocket, into
which I had slipped a few of my mother’s ashes, and I started to sprinkle them on the stage. “Mom, you finally made it.” It was an incredibly satisfying moment for me. And the audience went nuts.

Incidentally, she also made it to the Greek Theatre, the Hollywood Bowl, and the Royal Albert Hall. She’d helped to fulfill my dreams. I couldn’t do much in return, but it was a gesture; it was payback.

Lunch with Cass at Café Figaro, New York City, 1967
(© Henry Diltz)